We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving Dota 2 to the engine recently, we are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.

Since the last AMA, we've introduced refunds on Steam, we've grown our Support staff by roughly 5x, and we've shipped a new help site and ticketing system that makes it easier to get help. We've also greatly reduced response times on most types of support tickets and we think we've improved the quality of responses.

We definitely don't think we're done though. We still need to further improve response times and we are continually working to improve the quality of our responses. We're also working on adding more support staff in regions around the world to offer better native language support and improve response times in various regions.

The issue with Half-Life for me is that I was involved in a much higher percentage of the decisions about the games, so it's hard for me to look at them as anything other than a series of things I regret. There's no information in my response about what we'll do in the future. It's simply easier for me to be a fan of things that in which I was less directive.

Products are usually the result of an intersection of technology that we think has traction, a group of people who want to work on that, and one of the game properties that feels like a natural playground for that set of technology and design challenges.

When we decided we needed to work on markets, free to play, and user generated content, Team Fortress seemed like the right place to do that. That work ended up informing everything we did in the multiplayer space. Left 4 Dead is a good place for creating shared narratives.

If you are involved in a game, everything ends up being a set of trade-offs. Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in the game. I just feel those more personally about Half-Life for a bunch of reasons. And Xen.

TF2 has millions of unique players per month, and the team is staffed by a group of people that love and play the game. We're committed to supporting and growing TF2 with new features, content, and player experiences.

We're currently working on our next major update, which features a new campaign, the Pyro class pack, matchmaking improvements/features, and lots of game balancing improvements.

As far as a roadmap is concerned, our priorities for 2017 are to replace the UI with Panorama, to make CS:GO available in more territories where a lot of Counter-Strike fans don't have easy access to it (like China), and anti-cheat. Of course, we're also planning on continuing to ship bug fixes and new features throughout the year, as in the past.

We plan to continue updating every week or two. As for Operations, there's no set schedule. We weigh that work relative to other work we could choose to focus on and other recent work seemed better for the product. For example, at the end of 2016 we chose to focus on shipping Inferno, improving spatial audio via HRTF, joinable public lobbies, and some long-term work that hasn't shipped yet.

We haven't considered community managers because in general we prefer to communicate by shipping game updates. We try to avoid disrupting conversations happening in the community, which is why we tend to be quiet a lot of the time. But we do weigh in when we have useful information to help those conversations along.

Source 2 is a bunch of system rewrites. For CSGO, we evaluate these new systems on their individual merits. Some CSGO rework is in progress, such as the UI that utilizes parts of Source 2. Other systems might follow. Some Source 2 systems might never be right for CSGO.

Relevant anecdote: When we used to be approached about Source 2 at Majors we would ask "what is it that you're hoping Source 2 will do for CSGO" and for a while the response was "I expect hitboxes will be better." Moving everything to Source 2 would not actually solve that problem. We just went ahead and spent time working on better hitboxes.

What hiatus? You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook for news. We have decided to shift more of our focus back to articles. We have some plans for the website.

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last news feed on here was october 27th. nothing till now. thats fine but don't say it wasn't a hiatus. Then announce new plans only when i ask about it. You could of let us know on this website what changes are being made, anytime between now and last October.

I don't need more Half-Life, I just want Valve to make new Singleplayer games. I replayed Portal 2 a month ago and I forgot how bloody amazing that game is. My thirst for oldschool shooters was erased by the new Doom and Wolfenstein The New Order, and they will probably announce a sequel to one of those this E3.
And since Marc Laidlaw retired, I am at the least sceptical about how they would continue the story, even though I know that Chet and Erik obviously did a fantastic job with Portal 2 and they have other writers too probably.

The CS:GO things sound exciting, and the confirmation that the movies are coming.

Staff Member

last news feed on here was october 27th. nothing till now. thats fine but don't say it wasn't a hiatus. Then announce new plans only when i ask about it. You could of let us know on this website what changes are being made, anytime between now and last October.

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We were looking for someone to help us with the website, which is why we didn't announce anything. We want to switch a blog system with news, articles, and a comment system. I do my best to keep the social profiles and the wiki alive with the help of my friends.

Why interview Gabe Newell now? We already know the status of their current projects. We can't force him to talk about Half-Life 3 and other unannounced titles. We interviewed developers from Valve and other companies in the past.

Also VNN got an interview out of pity. Gabe hurt his feelings by saying hes never even heard of VNN, and felt guilty about it. There won't be any decent information in the interview, just like there hasn't been any decent info from a Gaben interview in the last decade.

Biollante's name likely comes from the prefix bio (ビオ), referring to organic life, and the English word plant (プラントpuranto?).

Within the context of Godzilla vs. Biollante, Biollante gets her name from Dr. Shiragami, who upon seeing the creature gives it the name Biollante, stating it is the name of a plant spirit from Norse mythology. In reality though, there is no figure named Biollante in Norse mythology, although numerous nature deities do exist in Norse mythology, with almost all of them being female.

commenting on tf2, will be saddened when shit hits the fan like it did in July 2016 (too much content updates in 1 go)

This time am betting its comp only mode but everyone will be distracted by the Pyro update n other stuff, as there will be a lot.

Today there is so much competitive gaming. Valve were always working towards games with more n more comp.

If you look at cs:source, all the old games. TF2 included. They were test beds for comp mode to come out years later.

For Dota 2, CSGO today it is a tough competitive environment, where everyone worries about how much points they earn and so on that determines your rank which determines your placement in the player pool. To me this is fine, because it started this way. TF2 arguably didn't.

speaking of TF2 now

Last big update, it set the foundation of matchmaking, for what follows. Rillers team want a combined casual comp, punish players who leave a match, restrict their freedoms and so on. Only comp was requested if you remember.

What people probably don't realise is they intentionally broken the tf2 service. They knew 'Blizzards Overwatch' will takeaway players anyway, so they decided this is the time to do some testing. Lay down the foundation for matchmaking n so on which was intentionally bad (test n fix) just so later, in 2017 give it a elo system instead with ranks, not the cosmetic we have now.

If people knew this was planned, they would be angry at Valve.

To bring tf2 inline with dota2/csgo competitive play. View this a carrot and stick routine, threats followed by actions.You will be either be punished or rewarded based on your performance......and the stick is a elo system, if you dont win or if you leave you will be punished based on that performance in various ways.

Anyway people seem to want it, however i think everyone knows there is alot of tf2 fans who like it for its relaxed do whatever approach and not be punished for it, is what i like especially.

But we also like the odd intense and fun, hard rounds, maybe even a lot! Doesn't mean we want a official comp mode as the only means to get onto official servers, does it?

So this is why I'm commenting on it, specifically the official servers. Community servers unaffected but (no servers)

Rillers team just want to increase the audience, will it backfire? Matchmaking already kinda backfired but stuck because they rollback some things, not a success btw.

So i have here a partial transcript of what riller said in the interview about balancing a comp and casual mode.

##
prior to saying this, he mentions a elo system will be put into competitive mode, so when they combining the two, it might happen later. who knows.

But if its combined to have 1 audience, they will likely do it and not tell us and say 'hey sorry break down in communication, but yeah deal with it! its the new changes' It was never made clear in the interview this is the plan.
##

Riller TF2 dev:

TF2 has been around long enough that we used to regard casual and competitive as a separate community, and now we view that as outdated. Instead we view it as a single community with a spectrum of players. So part of that is fixing some of the things that sorta barrier between those groups.

One example would be the competitive players are sorta on their own created this other version of the game with different rules, and they all restrict things like classes and they will ban most of the weapons..and so we like to fix that by finding some sort of common ground between the communities.

Some of the work we did to do that, recently for example is we put in a official competitive matchmaking mode and what we've done is find some common ground format that is familiar to competitive players and casual players.

So there is a bridge between the two, we're also trying to do things like make competitive players more visible to our casaul players, so we've done things like ingame streaming list.

end of that part of the talk, (fyi i wrote this out)

So it was always going to happen, am shocked its going to. We had a good run. 9 or more years.

Given how csgo especially is linked to online gambling and so on, who wont be mad to see tf2 treated like that? They will take away Team Fortress 2 'freedom cherry'. lol

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About Us

In March of 2003, a mystic crowbar appeared in Edge magazine, signifying that a long-awaited sequel to Half-Life was approaching. Munro formed this site almost immediately, as a place for people to share every snippet of information available about the upcoming sequel, as well as discuss it with other fans of the series.